Item — HN Reader

Exactly! Let's go back to the times when things were consistent! Remember when you couldn't tell AIM from ICQ from MSN Messenger from Skype because they looked and behaved consistently?

Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."

1 comments

I think they were referring to internal consistency?

Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.

"Layered Windows" is how an application can have a window which is not the typical rectangular shape, such as the "Head" skin for Windows Media Player. That would be the "crazy things" that apps were allowed to do.

That's just a mask applied to the window, app were always allowed to do that on Windows and still are.